It’s what it looks like. A small human in a lab jar. Correctly guessing the new club was not yet ready, I dropped by to discover a medium-sized movie crew on supper break. They were doing exteriors and got forced inside by the summer rain. This jar was one of the props. The plot is about a mad scientist who doesn’t have a family of his own, so he murders things and shrinks them. Dogs, cats, people, probably the only thing you can’t shrink is AT&T brains. The script was written by a local woman and should be released in a few months.
I had a fascinating conversation with the crew and invited them all to use my Internet access. I supplied the name of this blog, although compared to what they are doing, my material may be altogether too original. Take for instance the frying pan discussion of last day. Already I get flak on that one, but hey, that is now the most famous frying pan in Florida history. When the frying pan arrives, I’ll be sure to follow up now.I dropped in at Jimbo’s where for the next two weeks I am forbidden to say the name of that large bird that goes “gobble gobble”, seems they’d already heard the tale. Many times before I got there. Wallace was in the shop but I could not take even a short break because of the new software, Café Manager Lite. As usual, it over-promised and under-delivered.
I dropped every menu and tested every option, rebooting the computers as much as thirty times each. It works, but leaves out too many instructions and is loaded with quirks. One in particular is annoying. My computers have limited Internet user accounts and one administrative account. I do not want the timer to self-start when I log onto the admin account, just the limited accounts. I’ll be again tomorrow wrestling with that one.
The instructions say you can stop and start a session. You can’t. Nor can the timer be frozen on the client computers. Any body wants a pee break it is gonna cost you. The advertising says a session can be “reset” which I took to mean starting over. Instead, it remotely reboots the computer. What moron came up with that? One of the worst features is the size of the buttons on the main menu. They are tiny and they require extremely careful mouse clicks to operate. This is stupidity normally associated with MicroSoft, who put the file rename and delete commands right next to each other.
Still, it is a workable system better than what I had. There are several ways to defeat the thing, the easiest is to simply reboot the computer, which sets the timer back to zero. (The Start button cannot be disabled, I have no idea how they missed that one.) It seems to be a largely untried system that has not been tested under all possible scenarios. If Vibersoft is using it as advertising for their larger Café Manager Pro software, they had better clean it up immensely. I will get it to work.
I did not perform tonight, I was not up to the task. Too pooped to whoop. Or to hump equipment in the rain for too small a crowd. Here, take a look at today’s weather in the middle of a bright afternoon. Sunny Florida means only in your winter time, the dry season, or as I heard it put, “We get three inches of sunshine every day.”ADDENDUM
A customer in the shop today turned out to be that guy I met a few weeks ago through Johnny D at Boston’s. It took us a minute to make the connection, but he is a guitarist who sings. He’s got a gig at the King’s Head(?) on Dania Beach Blvd. He has the natural tendency of guitarists to deem anything but his own selections as bad taste. I had emailed him my song list of over 100 tunes and he said he “recognized a couple of them”. (Really? All songs on my list are massive gold label hits known worldwide.)
He meant that as a snide remark, but you do get that. Instead of looking at the material and saying, “Hey, I can work with this style”, he begins to psychoanalyze the list for impurities. This behavior gets markedly worse when guitarists turn 40 and try to deny they’ve missed the boat. Did I ask him if he had been living under a rock because he didn’t play my music? Guitarists tend to never have heard of any song they don’t want to play because it doesn’t contain a major guitar solo, no names mentioned. Like most guitarists and old music, he just wants to do one thing on stage (wail away) and get paid a full share.
What happened next was revealing. When I pulled up my song list, I also correctly processed a Limewire hit. He was absolutely astonished. He did not even know what a “T3 or better” was or what difference it makes. At first he said he knew this and that, but shut up fast when he saw me in action. There is a chance he knew 5% of what I was doing. He had brought his computer in because of viruses from downloaded music. Now I cannot correct the attitude of a guitar player, but he walked out with a totally different perspective on where he stood, let me tell you. I doubt he will ever send me his song list now. Hell, he’s still running back to his village to inform them he’s discovered fire.
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